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T H E O R Y
The Literary in Theory
37
on identity and agency, and to any attempt, as in
Nussbaum and Knapp, to
link the distinctiveness o f literature to its bearing on questions o f agency.
But if the literary can function as exemplary representation o f agency
for theory, it can also be a source o/'agency in theory, as literary works pro
vide leverage for theoretical argument. One impressive case where the role
o f literature is complex and overdetermined (and hence hard to define) is
Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim. Antigone, notoriously, makes a claim in
Sophocles’ play (precisely what sort o f claim is the major issue in the his
tory o f the play’s reception) and thus functions as a potentially exemplary
literary representation o f agency. Luce Irigaray has suggested, for instance,
that Antigone can offer an identification for many girls and women living
today. But the terseness o f Butler’s title suggests that Antigone— repre
sentation or text— has a claim on us. If Butler can use the words and deeds
o f Antigone and the text o f Sophocles’ play Antigone in a sustained argu
ment about the relations between psychoanalysis and politics, focused on
the problem o f ways o f theorizing kinship relations and family structures,
it is not just because Antigone the agent is in some ways exemplary but
rather because the figure o f Antigone has given rise to a powerful tradition
o f interpretation— from Hegel to Lacan and Irigaray— ^which has had ef
fects on our conceptions o f kinship and o f the possible relations between
the family and the state.
We can ask, foregrounding the question o f exemplarity, what would
have happened if psychoanalysis had taken Antigone rather than Oedipus
as its point o f departure. Butler writes that
it is perhaps interesting to note that Antigone, who concludes the Oedipal drama,
fails to produce the heterosexual closure for that drama, and that this may inti
mate the direction for a psychoanalytic theory that takes Antigone as its point of
departure. . . . She does seem to deinstitute heterosexuality by refusing to do what
is necessary to stay alive for Haemon, by refusing to become a mother and wife,
by scandalizing the public with her wavering gender, and by embracing death as
her bridal chamber.'^
Her case offers alternatives to the conceptual routes that Western culture
14. Luce Irigaray,
Speculum o f the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni
versity Press, 1985), 70.
15. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 76.
has taken. But, more important, the interpretation o f Antigone has un
dergirded a discourse about kinship and its relation to political structures
that continues to exercise its effects today. “In her act, she transgresses
both gender and kinship norms, and though the Hegelian tradition reads
her fate as a sure sign that this transgression is necessarily failed and fatal,
another reading is possible in which she exposes the socially contingent
character o f kinship, only to become the repeated occasion for a rewriting
o f that contingency as immutable necessity.” *'’ That is, Butler has given
a kind o f agency to Antigone that problematizes the agency o f theory or
criticism. Butler’s intervention does not simply cite the figure o f Antigone
as an agent exercising certain choices or making claims. It undertakes de
tailed readings o f Sophocles’ text, Antigone, to expose the reductive sim
plifications in the readings by theorists, which have set kinship (as a con
figuration o f “natural relations”) against the state, have idealized kinship as
a structural field o f intelligibility, and have thus established certain forms
of kinship as intelligible and legitimate. This idealization, which legiti
mates a certain form o f family structure as supposedly prior to and outside
o f politics, has drawn on the story o f Antigone but, in so doing, has de
nied the challenge that Sophocles’ text offers to its peremptory inscription
of intelligibility. If Hegel attends to Antigone’s acts but not her speech,
studying that language today reveals the instability o f the conceptual ap
paratus erected on her example. It is by appealing to the complexities and
indeterminacies o f this literary work that Butler intervenes, in the name
of those who today are attempting to work out alternative family struc
tures— ^where two men or two women may parent a child, for instance—
and whose practice encounters the stigmatizing idealization in psychoana
lytic, cultural, and political theory o f the supposedly primordial, symbolic
positions o f Father and Mother. Claude Lévi-Strauss in his structuralist
studies o f myth and totemism maintained that myths are central to culture
because they are “good to think with.” Butler’s use o îAntigone in an argu
ment about the legitimacy o f models o f kinship and politics shows that lit
erature is better to think with— in that its language provides powerful re
sources for a critique o f constructions that it has been used to sustain and
thus o f the institutional arrangements it has helped to support.
16. Ibid., 6.
